The Steppes of Paris (16 page)

“Let’s take a walk before we go in,” she suggested to Edward. “To digest our dinner.”

At Edward’s instigation, they had not gone back to the Pré Geneviève, but to a less pretentious Armenian restaurant where they had, indeed, both eaten heavily.

It seemed to Edward the moment to take Irina’s hand, as they paced in silence under the trees of the dark Avenue Duquesne. But he still hesitated for Irina had an abstracted look on her face, and he worried that any move on his part which could be construed as pressure might tip the balance of her doubts against him.

Finally, when they had reached the top of the avenue, cast affectionate glances at the Taverne Tourville, and turned round again, Irina said, “I have a matter to discuss with you, Edouard.”

He thought dismally, ‘Here goes.’

“You must not let my family know to what extent you are seeing me,” Irina said. “Babushka and Great-Aunt Elena and Varvara Stepanovna, if you ever meet her; they mustn’t find out that we are – friends. Do you accept that?”

Edward grinned. “Yes, of course I do. I mean, it’s pretty unlikely they’d ever grill me on the subject, isn’t it? I’ll go along with it, though, if that’s what makes you happy. But why?”

Irina made one of her “Tchuh!” noises. “Isn’t it obvious? We’re not what you’d call ideally suited, are we? You must remember, they’ve still got the outlook of another time and another place. They have these ridiculous old unrealistic dreams for me; they want me to be happy.”

They walked along a façade or two in silence.

Perhaps embarrassed by her explicit relegation of their romance to the rank of doomed endeavour, Irina went on, “And also the fact they know you’re going away in a year or two; they’d be shocked.”

Edward said, “OK, point taken.” He felt an unmistakable relaxation at Irma’s having mentioned his departure just at this juncture.

They turned into the Cité Etienne Hubert. The stump of a street for once seemed long, and as they walked down to Number Nine, Edward was aware all the way of the big wall at the end of the street, looming over them, closing off the distance.

At the double front doors, in the brief pause between Irina pushing the brass bell and the right-hand door springing open in response, she glanced at Edward. He saw she had, miserably, as many misgivings as he did.

The lift came down clanking, and they stepped inside. While they waited for it, looking upward through the lozenged wire mesh for the small wooden box to come into view, neither of them said a word. They transferred their taut apprehension to the arrival of the lift, staring as if it mattered at the two quivering ropes which ran the length of the lift shaft. Irina pressed the button for the fifth floor and, with a jolt followed by a shivering moan, they set off.

Confined for the first time, the two of them, in a small oblong space, they were enclosed in a sudden inescapable
intimacy. As the lift rose, swaying and shuddering, through the red-carpeted tiers of the staircase which encircled it in a long embrace, they exchanged their first frank look of mischievous complicity. But Irina looked away almost at once and fixed her eyes seriously on the struts of the door. Not to be outdone, Edward concentrated on the safety instructions. Ascenseurs Roux-Combaluzier gravely informed passengers that unaccompanied children were forbidden to use this machine. Accompanied, they were to be kept well away from the passing walls of the lift shaft. The lift, till then an absurd spoof of a vehicle, took on an uncertain, treacherous quality. Behind them the thin, hairy ropes hissed. At each passing floor, the lift cabin acknowledged the possibility of stopping with a little lurch.

Edward read on automatically until he came to a sentence which filled him with profound pleasure, and a childish wish to grab Irina by the arm, to point and share the joke. The sentence read: “
Pour
provoquer le départ, appuyer sur le
bouton de l’étage désiré
.” He had always had a soft spot for Parisian lifts; ungainly spiders laboriously spinning their webs. Now he relished the new erotic connotations they would shortly acquire. Having pushed the requisite button to provoke their departure, he and Irina were rising, side by side, to the floor they desired. With a final audible exertion, the lift covered the last few feet, slowing disturbingly and drawing level with the fifth-floor landing only inch by inch. As they waited those ultimate inches, Irina’s hand ready to yank back the sliding inner door, she caught sight of Edward’s broad grin, due solely to the phrase “the desired floor”, and as the lift bumped home, she responded with a quick nervous smile.

She looked at her watch as she opened the front door and murmured, “Ah good, Babushka will be long in bed. But don’t make too much noise, just in case.”

She didn’t hang their overcoats in the hall cupboard but took them and went to put them in another room. She gestured to Edward silently to go and wait for her in the sitting-room and a moment later she came in, reperfumed he was sure, and shut the sitting-room door behind her.

“The one thing to be thankful for,” she said, “is that
Babushka goes to bed really early, at nine or ten o’clock. It leaves me room to manoeuvre.” And she laughed.

Edward was about to tell her what had happened at her dinner; how he had been on his way back from the lavatory at twelve o’clock or one and had encountered Babushka, horror-struck, in the doorway of her room. But it seemed pointless to unsettle Irina by such a suggestion. If the aged grandmother found out what they were up to, what did he care?

“What sort of thing would you like now?” Irina asked him, in a way which seemed somehow so explicit, Edward was almost embarrassed. “Coffee? Whisky? Vodka?”

She displayed herself in front of him and on an impulse, really, he had not intended to take the initiative, Edward stood up, walked towards her smiling, and enfolded her in a hug. There was more of her than he had expected; every woman he had hugged before had been distinctly smaller and thinner than he was. That had even been part of the enjoyment; wrapping up and squeezing someone he could contain. Irina was of undiscovered dimensions. She was a short woman, but as she leant forward appreciatively into his hug, he felt fleshy parts of her meet him the whole way down. She not only had splendid breasts, she had a tummy and soft round thighs. He might have expected her substance to repel him – when all was said and done, she verged on the fat – but quite the opposite happened. As he eagerly took her tighter, Irina burrowed her head into his chest as if she were embarrassed. Edward ran his hand down her back, to reassure her and encourage her, and he felt the robust bottom which completed her figure. They stood for a few moments, embracing in the middle of the dark-red rug and then they seemed simultaneously to decide it was time to proceed to the kiss.

He was about to prise Irina’s head up towards him when, of her own accord, she lifted it. She had her eyes shut but there was no mistaking her willingness. As he put his lips tentatively towards hers, they immediately opened and his tongue could make its way into a warm rotating welcome. Her hands, which had been fairly neutrally around his shoulders, moved into action; one frisked around the back of his neck,
making little delightfully ticklish forays into his hair, and the other slipped down to the small of his back where it exerted a most enjoyable pressure. For one moment, he thought there was a third hand cradling his right ear but then he realised it must be the frolicsome hand from his neck which had moved up. Reluctantly, they had in the end to draw apart and breathe, reluctantly also because it meant opening their eyes and looking each other in the face. Irina’s eyes only came open slowly and gazed at Edward, as if in amazement or dismay.

He said, “Howdy.”

What he did not expect were the two small tears which rolled out of the corners of her eyes and trundled down her cheeks.

They went to sit on the deepest settee. Irina rubbed the two tears away and beamed at him moistly.

“Ach, Edouard, I feel very happy.”

“You could have fooled me,” he teased her.

“No,” she said. “Don’t worry. I always cry when I’m happy.”

“Oh, great,” laughed Edward. “Thanks for warning me.”

Irina smiled, a smile of profoundly sad, sweet tenderness, which, despite her flushed face and her crumpled clothes, made her look in passing a little like the Mona Lisa. She laid one hand on Edward’s leg.

“Do we know what we’re doing?” she asked him earnestly.

Having embarked on his flippant mode, Edward found it hard to switch out of it. Also, he had little wish to.

“Nope,” he replied. “But does that matter?”

Irina sighed, just slightly. “No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t matter tonight.”

Edward pulled her towards him by the scruff of her neck. “Don’t let it matter at all,” he urged her. And because he had been wanting to for some time, he bent and nibbled her sweet pink ear.

They were not a lot further on when Irina sat up and in a way which Edward actually found disconcertingly businesslike, said, “OK, let’s go to my bedroom. It really is better there.”

He did not like being led to the bedroom and, when they got there, he found he did not really like the bedroom either.
It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room, in which Irina had visibly lived for years. It was full of mementoes of a younger Irina, décor, knick-knacks, books, and against one wall stood a virginal single bed. Edward felt for a minute he was coming with evil intent upon a schoolgirl. Irina closed the bedroom door behind him and resolutely locked it. “Just to be on the safe side,” she said. Then she stood a little way away from him waiting and he realised with alarm that in the chaste, lamplit bedroom all his desire had gone.

He was about to say, “Let’s just sit and talk for a minute, shall we?”

Irina, not coming any closer to him, but not taking her eyes off him, unbuttoned the waistband of her skirt. A few seconds later, the skirt, of soft coffee suede, slipped to the floor and Irina, wearing a lacy slip which crackled with static, stepped deftly out of it. She began, slowly and methodically, to unbutton the matching waistcoat, little brass button after little brass button. As she shrugged off the waistcoat, which followed the skirt to the floor, Edward could not stand it any longer and stepped forward to give her a helping hand.

Irina held him at bay. “You get undressed as well,” she said. “I don’t like to be the only one who’s naked.”

Edward wasn’t used to a woman who stated so baldly what she wanted. Her knowledge came, presumably, from extensive experience and, at the thought of it, Edward again felt his own desire retreat. But he was locked in now; there could be no running away. He would rely on what had always been reliable in the past; bare bodies, eyes shut, on sheets.

At the completion of a straight-faced ritual, they stood in front of one another naked. Edward was not at ease with his own nudity but, worse, Irina’s seemed to him unapproachable. It was like looking at an Old Master’s fleshy white fantasy; you might experience a passing flicker of fun but you would never in a million years imagine reaching out to fondle it. So he stood in front of Irina now, admiring her classic painter’s proportions, and he feared he couldn’t lay a finger on her.

“How do you do?” she said wryly. For she could see, of course, that she was not having the expected effect on him. She came towards him and did what Edward probably least
expected. She took him by the hand. She led him soberly to her bedside.

He was relieved and proud at how little time, in fact, passed between their lying down and matters righting themselves. The touch of Irina’s fingers, the feel of her bare skin soon did the trick. But, even so, he waited for quite a while before beginning. It occurred to him that he had never been to bed with a woman on this scale before. The single bed, of course, reinforced her proportions. But even so he realised he had never slept with a full-scale woman; someone with such unashamed undulations, with such fruitily pigmented nipples. He wanted to be jolly sure he made the most of them.

Everything went extremely successfully. Irina had a good time too, of that there was no doubt. At the height of their straining, panting, grappling and eventual groaning, he even wished for a second she would pipe down. He feared the grandmother’s slippers shuffling down the passage, and the door handle rattling. It speeded up his pleasure, and afterwards as they lay in silence, sweaty and gasping, he was aware that he was still listening out for the grandmother. Neither of them said anything for a long time, and in fact Edward thought he must have dropped off for a few moments because Irina seemed to be saying something to him which made no sense.

“Not fallen,” she was saying. “Not degraded. Do you believe me?”

“What d’you mean?” he asked sleepily.

“It is the truth,” Irina insisted. “Always before I have felt abused and degraded afterwards, as though I’d been pulled over and dragged through the dirt in my nice clothes. But not now; with you I feel quite equal and clean and comradely, you know, like two children lying here together in all innocence.”

Edward fondled the nearest part of her at random.

“What about you?” she persisted. “Are you contented?”

“Yup,” Edward said. “It was great.”

“For me it was excellent also,” Irina said unnecessarily. “But just lying here now is actually even nicer; I feel we’ve played a match without a winner and a loser. No victory, no defeat; just two schoolchildren who both came first in the
same race.” She giggled. “I’m starting to use your sporting expressions, Edouard.”

He spoke much less than she did. He would have been happier to lie still and not be constantly reminded with whom he was in bed. In the end Irina fell silent. He thought she was asleep, but she kept one arm proprietorially across him. He couldn’t get to sleep. He thought he’d finished with single beds at university. He rolled and shifted uncomfortably on the sticky sheets. In doing so, he managed to throw off Irina’s arm. But sleep eluded him. The next thing he knew Irina was shaking his shoulder and saying, “Wake up, Edouard. It’s half past six. You must go home before Babushka gets up.”